NIH announces six funding opportunities for the BRAIN Initiative in fiscal year 2014

The National Institutes of Health is releasing funding opportunities to build a new arsenal of tools and technologies for unlocking the mysteries of the brain. The NIH action is a step in implementing President Obama's Brain Research through Advancing Innovative Neurotechnologies (BRAIN) Initiative.

The six opportunities announced on December 17 were developed in response to high priority areas identified by the NIH Advisory Committee to the Director's BRAIN Working Group in September 2013. Awards are expected to be announced in September 2014 and will constitute NIH's initial investment of $40 million in the initiative. Three federal agencies—NIH, National Science Foundation, and Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, or DARPA—expect to contribute a total of $110 million in the 2014 fiscal year.

The President's BRAIN Initiative is a large-scale interagency federal effort that the President described as “giving scientists the tools they need to get a dynamic picture of the brain in action and better understand how we think, how we learn, and how we remember.”

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